Caesar, in the department of language
also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea
of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing
every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided
by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older
literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed
from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words
and phrases which, as the letters of this period show,
had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.
Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism
of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance
to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon
to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism
had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were
caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing
beyond recovery.

Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.
With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste
passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious
authorship of the latter gave to this classicism--what it had
hitherto lacked--extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became
the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism
attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist;
it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less
to the statesman, that the panegyrics--extravagant yet not made up
wholly of verbiage--applied, with which the most gifted representatives
of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.